The NEHAWU, SACP and YCLSA web sites carry versions of the
following button on their web sites, linked to the course archive:

Links at the top of this page remain useful in different
ways, and can be edited. In other respects, this blog will now be left as it
is. Up-to-date versions of the courses will be found on the new archive site.

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Please join this e-mail group. It is a discussion forum as
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Blog Policy

It is still possible that new courses could be developed for
the CU, but it is not very likely to happen in the near future. The 16-course
division of the material is comprehensive, convenient and stable, providing a
four-year cycle which is run on four parallel channels, and so is completed
every year, taking the four channels all together.

Therefore is no longer necessary to repeat the posting of the
courses to the blog. It is true that the courses are edited and updated as they
are sent out, so changes do occur. These changes can be picked up from the new
archive, linked above.

8 November 2015

Attached
and linked below is an article by Samir Amin on China, which can serve to
finish off our course on Anti-Imperialism.

This
article creates a picture of where the National Democratic Revolution takes a
country, if care is taken with the alliance that the NDR depends upon. The
Chinese communists have taken good care.

More than
this, the article is in effect a comparative critique of all of the post-20th-century
states, and more especially of the other BRICS countries: Russia, India, Brazil
and South Africa.

The article
deserves to be read, and read again at intervals. It is a comment by an African
revolutionary intellectual on the world as it has been, is and will be for a
long time to come.

One piece
of unfinished business left by this article may be the definition of socialism.

The
difference between the proletariat and the peasantry is not, as Samir Amin
correctly notes, that one has no use for property, while the other craves
property above all. These are caricatures.

The more
functional difference is the one pointed to by Marx in his “18th
Brumaire”, with his unforgettable phrase “sack of potatoes”, used to describe
the relation of peasant families to each other.

Whereas the
proletariat has learned two things in its harsh relationship with capital:
discipline and social organization.

The social
division of labour that is characteristic of the proletariat is what is
otherwise called the socialization of production under capitalism. It is the
material root of the idea of socialism.

Socialism
means the integration of people over larger and larger fields (village, town,
city, nation, world). If it is only de
facto, it may in practice be imperialism or it may be “globalization”.

The word
“socialism” is not precise. This is clear from the Communist Manifesto of 1848,
where Marx and Engels talk of feudal socialism and bourgeois socialism, among
others. Socialism is only society organised as a unity, and not as a “sack of
potatoes”. The proletariat is the most socialist class because of its highly
developed and explicit divisions of labour.

Communism
is a more precise word. It just means a classless society. Inherent in the idea
of communism is escape from capitalist relations of production. For all that
Samir Amin has to say about state capitalism, and correctly, he does not say
this much. But the initial reason why post-revolutionary production must be
“state capitalist” is only that there is no other relation of production
available.

So the move
of hundreds of millions of Chinese people from the rural areas to the new
cities is bound to be a move from peasant, more-or-less self-sufficient family
production, towards wage labour.

Seeing it
as a move from the smallholding to the factory is maybe an over-simplification.
But the absence of an alternative way of organizing production other than the
notional factory, is a reality.

The present
absence of an alternative set of relations of production appears to be the
reason why the Chinese will say that they don’t expect “socialism” (probably in
this instance meaning communism, the classless society) for another 200 years.

The
relationship between the proletariat (the hammer) and the peasantry (the
sickle) is not a relationship of like with like, but it is a relationship of
different classes.

In South
Africa, the urban survivalists, and the small businesses, have to some extent
replaced the peasantry, but they are also not strictly proletarian. Slogans
that include the words “workers and the poor” can obscure this distinction, or
illuminate it, depending how they are used, and understood.

Intelligent
communist-party leadership is the essential ingredient in the National
Democratic Revolution. Samir Amin gives ample evidence and argument for this
assertion.

7 November 2015

Piero Gleijeses has written a
lot. The second and last item in this final part of the “Anti-Imperialism, War
and Peace” course is an article of his (download linked below) containing this
memorable passage:

‘While
Castro’s troops advanced toward Namibia, Cubans, Angolans, South Africans, and
Americans were sparring at the negotiating table. For the South Africans and
Americans the burning question was: Would the Cuban troops stop at the border?
It was to answer this question that President Ronald Reagan’s Assistant
Secretary for Africa, Chester Crocker, sought Risquet. "My question is the
following," he told him: "Does Cuba intend to halt the advance of its
troops at the border between Namibia and Angola?" Risquet replied, "I
have no answer to give you. I can’t give you a Meprobamato [a well-known Cuban
tranquillizer] – not to you or to the South Africans. ... I have not said
whether or not our troops will stop. ... Listen to me, I am not threatening. If
I told you that they will not stop, it would be a threat. If I told you that
they will stop, I would be giving you a Meprobamato, a Tylenol, and I want
neither to threaten you nor to reassure you ... What I have said is that the
only way to guarantee [that our troops stop at the border] would be to reach an
agreement [on the independence of Namibia]." [15] On August 25, Crocker
cabled Secretary of State George Shultz: "Reading the Cubans is yet
another art form. They are prepared for both war and peace ... We witness
considerable tactical finesse and genuinely creative moves at the table. This
occurs against the backdrop of Castro’s grandiose bluster and his army’s
unprecedented projection of power on the ground." [16]’

War is a terrible thing. War
is never a choice for the revolutionaries. We are not pacifists but we do not
choose war and we do not choose to be banned or clandestine. We are for peace
and for full participation in all democratic forums.

The Cassinga massacre of 4
May, 1978, is now nearly forty years in the past. For some of us it was once an
event in our present life, very shocking for us because we had though that such
horrors were already in our past by the time. For others now living, the
Cassinga massacre is now so much in the past that it may be a struggle to see
what a huge significance this terrible event had. Please read the attached
document.

War no more

Perhaps this reflection, and
by extension this entire course, is a way of saying that it falls upon all of
us, young and old, to strive politically so that such things do not happen
again, and will not require again the militarisation of our struggle, here in
Southern Africa.

6 November 2015

In political education, our
method is to remove ourselves in place and time. We go to the “classics” and to
authors of the intermediate period, and we study other places, in the past or
in the present.

All of these provide us with
examples. The examples provide us with a theoretical and practical “sandpit”
that gives us a “codification” or in other words a basis upon which we may have
a common dialogue.

Dialogue is where political
education happens. Anything that can provide an occasion for political dialogue
is good for education.

Our own history can be used,
but what do we find? When looking for history of our liberation struggle, and
the history of the armed struggle in particular, we find very little. The
materials about the culminating struggle in Angola assembled below will have to
suffice for now. They can also serve as a small contribution towards
recognising the Cuban and Soviet comrades who fought faithfully and often fell
for us, until victory came.

Vladimir Shubin
has written and published two books in English: “ANC: A View from Moscow” and “The
Hot 'Cold War’: The USSR in Southern Africa”. These books are presently
available from bookshops in South Africa, or they can be ordered via the
Internet.

The Soviet record of events
does not correspond in every respect with the Cuban record, and this contrast
would force the readers or students to make judgements of their own, as to what
was really the critical path that led to the final political result, which
was victory in Angola, Namibia and South Africa. Let us hope to find a
suitable Soviet or Russian article in electronic form, soon.

Fidel Castro has written a
lot. Linked below, as our main item, is the speech he made on 2 December 2005,
on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the first Cuban expeditionary force
to Angola, which became what the US Imperialist diplomat Chester Crocker called
an “unprecedented projection of power”.

Jorge Risquet Valdés Saldaña, fighter, negotiator, and currently member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, has written (in Spanish) “El Segundo frente del Che en el Congo”
(ISBN 959-210-412-3, Casa Editorial Abril, 2006) – the history of the Patrice
Lumumba Battalion, in which Risquet served. The picture above is of the same
Jorge Risquet, a great and brave hero, also famous for his friendliness and joie-de-vivre. The person seen to the
left of Risquet is Piero Gleijeses, of whom more in the next item.

4 November 2015

Mahmood Mamdani’s “Citizen and Subject” (downloadable extract linked
below) maps the relations of four class-based powers in the anti-Imperial
struggles in Africa: Bourgeois, Proletarians, Imperialists and “Traditional
Leaders”. The (national) Bourgeois and the Proletarians are the modernisers and
the democrats, who are compelled by necessity to combine together to fight for
the democracy that forms the nation.

Capitalism has failed, and
Imperialism has failed. In South Africa, capitalist Imperialism arrived more
than 114 years ago, and it never delivered to the people or even employed more
than a fraction of them at any time. It started bad and it got no better.
Recently it has gone from a boom from which the masses somehow failed to benefit,
to a recession that will last for years. What’s new? The same excuses have been
there all along. Maybe it is truer to say that Imperialism didn’t fail: it only
lied. It was never going to deliver, and it never will.

Like Issa Shivji and Walter
Rodney (author of “How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa”, also downloadable in [1069 KB] PDF
format by clicking here),
Professor Mamdani is a cadre of the famous Dar-es-Salaam campus. Mamdani is now
Director of the Makerere Institute of
Social Research (MISR) in his native Uganda, and has previously served
in many capacities including at Columbia University, New York, USA, and the
University of Cape Town, South Africa.

Note that Mamdani's sense of
the word “subject” in this work is different and opposite from the usual communist,
or philosophical one. Here it means a subordinate person, like for example the
subject of a king, and not a free person.

In the book, Mamdani’s
principal insight is to recognise the class alliance typically sought by the
Imperialists in neo-colonial Africa countries. According to Mamdani, the
Imperialists prefer to ally with the most backward rural feudal elements (often
called “traditional leaders” or “chiefs” in Africa) in opposition to the
modernising bourgeoisie and proletariat of the cities and towns.

Mamdani regards South Africa
as the classic case in this regard, although he quotes many other examples.
Mamdani’s analysis stands in contrast with a common presumption, namely that
the Imperialist monopoly-capitalists tend to work through “compradors”, who are
local aspirant bourgeoisie, or bourgeoisie-for-rent, who do the Imperialists
work for them.

Such compradors do exist, and
clearly they exist in South Africa. Yet Mamdani’s scheme reflects the facts and
history of Imperialism in Africa better, at least up to now. Imperialism is in
general hostile to the national bourgeoisie. The typical neo-colonial war of
recent decades, including the Iraq war, the long war against Afghanistan, the
war against Libya, and the war against Syria, is a war of Imperialism against a
national bourgeoisie that wants national sovereignty and control over its
country’s national resources.

In the light of this analysis
it becomes easier to see why it is that the South African proletariat has long
been, via the ANC, in alliance with parts of its national bourgeoisie, for
national liberation, against the monopoly-capitalist oppressors with their
Imperial-globalist links.

The Imperialists make a
marriage of convenience with the most retrogressive social power that they can
find – tribalism – in a pact to hold Africa where it was under colonialism:
partly rich, but mostly dirt poor. In South Africa the Imperialists relied
heavily on Bantustan leaders and on the Inkatha Freedom Party, but the ANC was
able to form better links with the rural as well as with the urban masses, thus
achieving a class alliance that could, and in fact did, dominate the country in
terms of mass support.

3 November 2015

This part is the second-last
in the present series on Anti-Imperialism, Peace, and Socialism. This part is
designed to invite comrades to reflect upon the place of the anti-Imperialist
struggle within the entirety of world history.

That is why Issa Shivji’s
address on The Struggle for Democracy
and Culture (linked below) is used. It explicitly and correctly claims, on
behalf of the national-liberation and anti-colonial struggle, that for the time
being this national democratic revolutionary struggle carries the banner of
progress for the whole world.

For a long time past, and
into the future, until such time as the struggle for socialism itself becomes
once again the principal one, the National Democratic Revolutions taken
together constitute the main vehicle for human progress, bearing, and rescuing,
all that is noble and fine in humanity.

The bourgeoisie is a thieving
class and it will steal the clothes of the revolutionaries without any
hesitation if it sees the smallest, most temporary, advantage in doing so. The
Imperialist bourgeoisie wishes to reverse the appearance of its shameful past
and of its hopeless future. It wishes to claim the moral superiority that the
liberation movement has, and steal it.

Issa Shivji, the
revolutionary Dar-es-Salaam intellectual, shows very clearly how the monstrous
fraud is attempted. The constant droning about “good governance” is the extreme
of hypocrisy, coming as it does from the worst oppressors in history – the
force that has taken oppression to the ends of the earth – Imperialism. Read
Shivji. He tells it well. But also note the hypocritical machinations of our
present South African anti-communists, including but not limited to the DA. If
you did not know better, you could start to believe from what you read that it
was liberal whites who liberated South Africa from the old regime.

The struggle for democracy is
ours, not theirs. The struggle for freedom is ours. We are the humanists now.
We, the liberationists, are the principal creators of human history, and we
have been for many decades past. The 20th Century was the liberation century
and the first anti-Imperial century. That was when we overtook the others in
politics, in morality, and in philosophy. But we were only starting.

In the 21st Century we will
finish the job, and finish with Imperialism altogether.

2 November 2015

To underline the ruthlessness
of the Imperialist enemy, we can quote as follows:

“the US
decision to drop atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki ... was meant to
kick-start the Cold War [against the Soviet Union, Washington's war-time ally]
rather than end the Second World War”.

This statement is taken from
Norm Dixon’s article “Hiroshima and
Nagasaki: Worst terror attacks in history” published in Green Left Weekly,
August 3, 2005 (attached; download linked below).

The two worst-ever terrorist
attacks in history, by far, were perpetrated by the USA, and for the most
cynical and mendacious reasons.

Images of what resulted in
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are abundantly available on the Internet, but the ones
that show people, whether alive or dead, are too terrible to use here.

To this day the USA does not
face up to what it has done by these two vile acts.

This course is on
Anti-Imperialism, War and Peace. We cannot leave this thing out. We have to
note that the US power that did these unspeakable things is still active in the
world, and is still, as it was then, active in the cause of its own dominance
over the rest of us. The list of its crimes continues to grow longer every day.

31 October 2015

The second linked document is
included in this part because of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s correct and
insistent concern with the continuing threat to Africa (now materialising again
militarily as “US Africom”) posed by Imperialism in its last stage of
neo-colonialism.

Nkrumah believed that Africa
must unite, for the sole reason that if it did not unite, then it would not
have sufficient strength to resist the Imperialists. And so it has turned out.

Nkrumah defined
neo-colonialism as follows:

“The essence
of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory,
independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In
reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from
outside.”

He goes on to add:

“Neo-colonialism
is also the worst form of imperialism. For those who practise it, it means
power without responsibility and for those who suffer from it, it means
exploitation without redress. In the days of old-fashioned colonialism, the
imperial power had at least to explain and justify at home the actions it was
taking abroad.”

And in his Conclusion,
Nkrumah says:

“In the
earlier chapters of this book I have set out the argument for African unity and
have explained how this unity would destroy neo-colonialism in Africa. In later
chapters I have explained how strong is the world position of those who profit
from neo-colonialism.

“Nevertheless,
African unity is something which is within the grasp of the African people. The
foreign firms who exploit our resources long ago saw the strength to be gained
from acting on a Pan-African scale. By means of interlocking directorships,
cross-shareholdings and other devices, groups of apparently different companies
have formed, in fact, one enormous capitalist monopoly. The only effective way
to challenge this economic empire and to recover possession of our heritage, is
for us also to act on a Pan-African basis, through a Union Government.”

30 October 2015

Exactly how the
anti-Imperialist struggle will resolve itself in South Africa, Southern Africa,
and Africa in general, is something unpredictable at the tactical level. The
question of the armed defence of revolutionary change cannot be ruled out, and
we have examined this question.

This part of the present
series, referenced to the “Beyond Vietnam” speech (attached, and linked below)
of the late Rev Martin Luther King Junior, is designed to point to the
subjective political factor in the anti-Imperialist struggle.

Nowadays it has become
commonplace to refer to “international solidarity” as not only a specific, but
more so a universal idea. But this concept that we have largely stripped of its
particularity, generalising it as a formula, does actually have a tremendous
history whose meaning is not fully conveyed by a stock phrase called
“international solidarity”.

The anti-Imperialist struggle
and the democratic struggle can and should be one. It is not a matter of
charity of the rich to the poor. It is also not solely a matter of good-hearted
and exceptional individuals. But there have indeed been such individuals –
“MLK” was one of them – and there will be again.

What Martin Luther King
describes, and justifies, is: “why I
believe that the path from Dexter Avenue Baptist Church – the church in
Montgomery, Alabama, where I began my pastorate – leads clearly to this
sanctuary tonight.”

In other words, MLK at the
meeting of the “Clergy and Laymen Concerned about Vietnam”, in 1967, was
preaching the intrinsic, organic unity of the struggle of the common people
everywhere. It is not an artificial altruism, but it is a unity of purpose, in
concerted action against the single enemy that manifests itself everywhere and
oppresses us all: monopoly-capitalist Imperialism.

And further than his literal
message, there is also the extraordinary power and style of MLK’s oration. We
forget this factor of art too easily. Lenin spoke of “insurrection as an art”.
It is an art that goes beyond the military, and encompasses all of our
activities. Therefore when reading such a piece as MLK’s “Beyond Vietnam”
speech, one should regard it as a source of learning of the art of advocacy,
which is part of the art of leadership, essential to the art of insurrection.

“Now let us
begin. Now let us rededicate ourselves to the long and bitter, but beautiful, struggle
for a new world. This is the calling of the sons of God...” – Martin Luther King.

25 October 2015

The ANC’s famous 1969
Strategy and Tactics document adopted in the Morogoro, Tanzania Conference
involving O R Tambo, Joe Slovo, Chris Hani and others, is attached, and
downloadable from the link given below.

As a classic, the Strategy
and Tactics document can speak for itself. It is straightforward enough.

This document, like, for
example, the Freedom Charter, remains one of a handful that are held in the
highest regard by the South African liberation movement.

It is a typical document of
National Democratic Revolution.

It is short. It is really a
“must-read” for any student of SA revolutionary politics. It has implications
for today.

24 October 2015

The practical alternative to
the State that appeared in Paris in the beginning of 1871 was not only the
right of recall, and the whole people collectively in power and in perpetual
session. It was also the reappearance of the Armed People in a new kind of
societal framework. So-called Primitive Communism is an Armed People. Here, in
the Paris Commune, was an Armed People in advanced productive circumstances.

The security forces - army
and police - that had existed before the Paris Commune had been paid to support
the bourgeois State and to guarantee the State’s survival by suppressing,
whenever necessary, the working class. Under the Commune, these forces were
disbanded and not replaced. With hardly any exceptions, all “separations of
powers” were abolished in the Paris Commune, leaving only one power: The Armed
People.

In Chile, in the time of the
Popular Unity government that fell on 11 September 1973, instead of an Armed
People, a virtue was made of disarmament, and a “Peaceful Path” was worshipped
as the new political Golden Calf.

Volodia Teitelboim, in the document attached, and linked below, gives a brief
description, as one of those who was involved, of Chile’s Popular Unity
government and its disastrous end at the hands of traitor fascists who used the
national army to overthrow it. It was a shocking reminder of the purpose of the
“special bodies of armed men” of the bourgeois state.

Teitelboim calls for “A Reappraisal
of the Issue of the Army,” meaning a return to the view of the Paris Commune,
which Teitelboim mentions in the first line. This document is a sufficient
basis for a very good and necessary discussion.

Like the Chilean Popular
Unity government, ours is a multiclass government underpinned by a class
alliance for common goals. It is a unity-in-action, otherwise called a popular
front.

Why have we in South Africa
survived after 21 years, while the Chileans did not survive after only 1,000
days?

The answer could be that we
are not pacifists. Or, the answer could be that our crisis has not arrived yet.
Or, that we have passed at least one crisis (e.g. in mid-2008, resolved by the
recall of President Mbeki and the resignation of various ministers including
Terror Lekota and Mluleki George), which may not yet be the last.

The next featured text will
be the ANC’s original Strategy and Tactics document of 1969. It unashamedly
embraces armed struggle, and not any starry “Peaceful Path”. South Africans
were in this case in advance of the historic crisis that manifested in Chile.
Four years prior to the Pinochet coup in Chile overthrew the Popular Unity
government led by Salvador Allende, the Morogoro Conference of the ANC had laid
down the necessity for the armed defence of the revolution.

Picture:
There are very few photographs of freedom fighters in formation or in action to
be found on the Internet, whether of MK or any of any other liberation army;
but there are many photographs of freedom fighters in captivity. Full justice
has not yet been done. The picture is of a statue of Dedan Kimathi under the
blue sky of Kenya. AMANDLA! UHURU!